Author: Aaron Frey

“Zosha Di Castri and David Adamcyk’s Phonobellow, an hour-long new music theater work for five musicians, electronics, and large-scale performative installation, is the result of this collaborative process. Taking as their starting point the year 1877, Di Castri and Adamcyk explore how Muybridge’s high-speed camera and Edison’s phonograph have marked human perception. Via a heterogeneous assemblage of music, images, recorded texts/sounds, electronics, movement, sculpture, and lighting, the piece seeks to capture how deeply these inventions reverberated with people at the time, and continue to reverberate to this day.”

I saw this the other day and it was an experience – exciting, energetic, and unpredictable. Composed by Zosha Di Castri and David Adamcyk, performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble. More information here.

The MTA has a thankless and extremely difficult job: They have to keep the trains running. They have to do it with equipment from the 1930s, in a hostile funding environment, as administrations come and go, as public interest comes and goes, in the face of storms and accidents and pieces of aluminum foil. This they manage to do. 1.6 billion people every year take the New York subway. The system carries more than 60 percent of all people coming into Manhattan every day. It is, for the most part, safe, affordable, and there.

But still, a reasonable person looking at three projects that aim to do roughly the same thing, projects that have different teams and different agendas and seem to take, always, five years longer than planned and seem to cost, always, hundreds of millions of dollars—well, this person has to wonder whether there’s some law of the universe that makes large government software projects an expensive drag or whether in fact there’s a better way.

I just posted a review of Catación Pública on my other blog. It’s one of the most inspiring coffee companies I’ve come across, with the potential to make a big impact on the Colombian coffee scene. While waiting for owner Jaime Duque to arrive, I shot a few photos of the neighborhood around the cafe along with Chermelle Edwards (whose Coffeetographer blog has great photography). I’ve posted a few shots below, plus a couple more from around Bogotá.

Found this interesting, after seeing Muji’s beautiful prefab homes, and all the eccentric residential architecture that comes out of Japan.

“IN THE UNITED STATES, people buy homes as an investment. […] Not so in Japan […]

Since few Japanese homeowners plan to sell the home and flip it for profit, there’s little incentive to maintain the house. “This whole DIY concept that’s super popular here [in the U.S.]—you have TV shows devoted to it, you have Home Depot and Lowe’s and all these things that are devoted to building equity in your home—none of that exists in Japan,””

“It turns out that half of all homes in Japan are demolished within 38 years — compared to 100 years in the U.S. There is virtually no market for pre-owned homes in Japan, and 60 percent of all homes were built after 1980. In Yoshida’s estimation, while land continues to hold value, physical homes become worthless within 30 years. Other studies have shown this to happen in as little as 15 years.”

Animistic fantasy hip hop? With dinosaurs? It all goes together surprisingly well. This guy’s creativity is off the charts – indie video production and home-made creature costumes… How does this only have 11,000 views on Youtube? More of Historian Himself’s work below.

Accompanying the first track of the anticipated collaboration, Soused, between avant-garde crooner Scott Walker and sludgy noisemeisters Sunn O))) is an arresting short film by French director and choreographer Gisèle Vienne. Walker’s music — with or without Sunn O))) — is the stuff of waking nightmares, and Vienne’s dream-like film matches it fuzzed-out chord by fuzzed-out chord. A house in the mountains, a blonde-tressed woman moving in slow-motion epilepsy; a teenage boy (her son?) locked in tremulous horror; a car crash?; and a sudden appearance by French novelist, theater artist and dominatrix Catherine Robbe-Grillet… it’s eerie, disquieting, and, with its narrative elisions, entirely hypnotic.

“Once a romantic hero, then an existential one — blond, narrow-hipped, unsmiling behind sunglasses — Mr. Walker no longer has a stage persona. He hasn’t performed in public since a television appearance in 1995, and hasn’t played a concert since 1978. Whatever his music is now, it’s not pop. He’s a composer who happens to use his voice, a semi-operatic baritone pushed to high and quivering extremes, as an instrument to serve his meticulous texts, which on the new album, “Soused,” include words like “bliaut” — a 12th-century European overgarment — and “bescumber.” (Look it up.) And maybe something else: a maker of abstract dramas with tones as characters. His work demands that you come more than halfway toward his isolation, his need to do things differently, and perhaps his story of turning from light to dark.

I would argue that “Soused,” which comes out Oct. 20 on the 4AD label, might be the first music Scott Walker has made in a very long time — maybe since his contributions to the Walker Brothers’ final record, “Nite Flights,” in 1978 — that can be absorbed into the body and enjoyed as a thrill, without needing to learn a lot of other context about his aesthetic transgressions, without attending to the Myth of Scott. Rather than withholding musical or emotional payoffs, which has long been his way, there’s a sort of constant payoff here: no orchestra this time, but the steady electric-guitar and bass drones of Sunn O))) (simply pronounced sun), rich and distorted and marvelous.”

“The best innovations — both socially and economically — come from the pursuit of ideals that are noble and timeless: joy, wisdom, beauty, truth, equality, community, sustainability and, most of all, love. These are the things we live for, and the innovations that really make a difference are the ones that are life-enhancing. And that’s why the heart of innovation is a desire to re-enchant the world.”